College football has spent the last decade shedding its amateur skin. Between the dawn of the transfer portal, the explosion of NIL, and the realignment frenzy reshaping the sport’s geography, it now feels like CFB has finally gone pro. And nobody saw that shift clearer than Nick Saban. Before walking off into retirement, the seven-time national champion said the quiet part out loud—that the sport he once mastered is no longer about just coaching but constructing. And it starts with a title that once felt foreign to Saturdays: general manager.
That evolution—from clipboard to calculator, from playbook to payroll—is now at the center of the modern CFB system. Analyst Adam Breneman broke it down plainly.
“The general manager position in college football will continue to be probably the most critical role in the next decade. With all that’s going on in college football, coaches don’t have the time or the bandwidth to decide how much money is a player getting paid? Who are the players we’re actually recruiting? What does the roster look like with roster turnover, the transfer portal, the numbers that go into the roster?” Breneman’s words cut with clarity because the job has fundamentally changed. Coaches used to pick up the groceries. Now, they just cook the meal.
Breneman made another key point: “What colleges are doing is shifting to that NFL model where the coaches are recruiting and developing talent. They’re not identifying the talent anymore. The evaluation process and the identifying—hey, we want to recruit these players—is going to the general managers, staff, and the scouts in the college football program to take that off the coach’s plate.” Translation: Talent acquisition is now a front office job.
The head coach might shake hands on the visit, but the scouting, valuation, and negotiation are increasingly being handled by a team of off-field architects. That’s not just efficient—it’s necessary.
And here’s the big twist—the money matters. A lot. “Also, how much to pay the players?” Breneman added. “You now have revenue sharing coming where you have to decide. We have a quarterback we’re recruiting. How much do we want to pay this quarterback recruit? The head coach doesn’t have time to think about that. He should have input, but it gets decided by the general manager.”
Welcome to salary cap thinking without an actual cap. What GMs now navigate is the same equation as their NFL peers: how to pay the right guys, at the right time, to keep the locker room, the budget, and the scoreboard in sync.
This isn’t about undermining coaches. It’s about protecting them. Coaches are still the tone-setters. They coach, they install schemes, and they inspire. But now, they lean on GMs to manage roster value—which is a real number now—and long-term strategy. With NIL in play, roster churn is becoming an annual ritual, and some schools are flipping 30+ players a cycle. And those who don’t get with it risk getting left behind.
You have to have alignment from top to bottom. When you start hiring GMs, if the owner, the GM, and the coach are not in alignment, you’ve got issues and problems. Because you’re going to bring the wrong players to the team that don’t fit the system and the scheme, and they’re going to struggle. And you’re going to pay the wrong guys, which can happen in college right now. This is the ultimate truth of the new era. Culture still wins games, but it’s built in boardrooms now as much as locker rooms.
Nick Saban breaks down the real power players
Nick Saban might be off the sidelines, but he’s not done dropping gems about the evolution of CFB. During a recent appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, Saban peeled back the curtain on one of the game’s fastest-growing positions: GMs. It’s not your old-school recruiting coordinator anymore.
“I think the GM is what you would refer to as a GM in the NFL,” Saban explained. “In other words, how do we bring players to the team? Like most of the time, if you were coaching in the NFL, you make a decision before you go in. I’m going to coach the players. I’m going to cut the players. But you’re going to decide who we bring to the team.”
That’s a whole different ballgame in the NIL and transfer portal era. And Saban didn’t stop there—he touched on the high stakes of roster management in today’s locker rooms.
“You can pay the wrong guy, and then you’re going to suffer for it, because some player is going to outperform a player that’s making money, and that’s going to create problems in your locker room,” Saban said. Alabama clearly gets it. The Tide just inked GM Courtney Morgan to a new three-year deal worth $825,000 per year last season, setting the standard.
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